Control MIDI with an Android device

[Lewis] wanted to control MIDI devices with the huge touch screen that is his Android phone. After he couldn’t find a simple hardware implementation of MIDI out, he turned to an IOIO board to send MIDI notes to just about any imaginable musical hardware. It’s a clean build and fills a gap in the abilities of the Android platform.

Because of the woeful support of MIDI in Android, [Lewis] couldn’t find a good way to push MIDI notes from his phone to other devices. While there are a few high-overhead options like MIDI over wi-fi or a Bluetooth connection, there wasn’t much in the way of a straight-up hardware connection to other MIDI devices. [Lewis] got around this limitation by using an IOIO board and the right software to send MIDI notes though a DIN-5 connector.

Although the project works as intended, [Lewis]’ build could be made more permanent by building one of these MIDI interfaces and wiring that to the IOIO. All the Android code is up and available, along with a neat demo of [Lewis] controlling the delay time of an effects unit in his guitar rig. You can check that video out after the break.